My nearby touristy town has announced that they have changed their traffic system to let pedestrians cross in the same direction as traffic, meaning if east and west traffic has a green light, pedestrians moving east and west will have a walk light.

This replaces what is known as the "Barnes Dance."

Here is how Wikipedia describes it:

"A pedestrian scramble, also known as a 'X' Crossing (UK), diagonal crossing (US), scramble intersection (Canada), exclusive pedestrian phase, and more poetically Barnes Dance, is a pedestrian crossing system that stops all vehicular traffic and allows pedestrians to cross an intersection in every direction, including diagonally, at the same time.

It was first used] in Kansas City, Missouri and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in the late 1940s, and has since then been adopted in many other cities and countries. It was most recently adopted in London's busy Oxford Circus in 2009 and in Washington, DC at 7th and H streets, in May 2010. The most famous implementation of this kind of intersection is in Shibuya, Tokyo."

I've always enjoyed doing the Barnes Dance. Maybe sometime I'll go up to town and observe their new system to see if it's an improvement. The sidewalks in that town get very crowded during the summer with shopsters, baby strollers, and dogs. I can imagine that the street corners would get very congested with all those folks waiting their turns to cross the intersection.

Still rainy here in northern Colorado, and the river is high. Even Las Vegas is at least 25 degrees cooler than usual these last couple of days. My heart goes out to those people in Arkansas dealing with the tragedy of that flash flood.